How To Be Lazy And Fail By Following Your New Year’s Resolutions

A Rant that left my keyboard..in a nice condition

It’s a new year, which means seeing the gyms packed, people speed walking in black sauna suits on the sidewalks, SlimFast being bought in large amounts, and the self help sections in bookstores being camped out by customers. In a few weeks the gyms will be hardly busy, the sauna suits, get replaced by moms wearing sweatsuits pushing strollers, and co-workers lighting up cigarettes will remove the nicotine patches for the duration of their smoke break. All of this just because tax season came around to fill them with the stress of getting a return, instead of owing the government money. Okay, well that isn’t the reason why of course, its because their resolutions had no staying power and with the weather being cold, no one has the need to look good in a swimsuit.

I bet, like me you might of made some business resolutions too. Like to finally start one, save more cash, or join some program. I am the master of non-committing startups(this maybe being the 6th year in a row not doing anything) so I can say what will keep your wealth dreams from ever happening by following these steps to just appear like…your on your way. Just like Any other resolution.

Step One – Take only action when you reach x amount of savings-Quite frankly, waiting around for the cash means that cash isn’t being put aside in the first place. The concept of Pay yourself first, means buying what you want, pay your bills, and then save.

Step Two – Sit around, another year researching the next big thing, within the big things(insert your favorite category, investments, real estate, or internet businesses) trying to figure out one requires the least amount of thought and action-This one easy to do, since new programs come out all the time. Plus it’s a lot of work researching all these websites, forums, and periodicals, for this advice, enough that you feel like you’re creating a business in the process.

Step Three-Joining several of these programs you researched, look at the information, decide its not what you thought it would be, and join another one covering almost the same exact material in the previous one did and still decide you cannot do it-This will leave you in a endless researching loop, making you look even busier and you’re spending your cash, so you must be getting somewhere, with your new knowledge you keep

Step Four-Over analyze everything, becoming busy going thru the details, and when it doesn’t exactly turn out just perfect, freak out, and give up.

Step Five-once again, don’t work on your business ever, because Researching is busy work worth pursing. Just keep at finding more and more details, till you decide you can get, more research done. Knowledge is power, right?

So enough of this attempt of satire. What does it really take?

Time-Even if you can commit 15 do it. But you will only get 15 minutes worth of results at first. When you reach a different level, its probably a different story. Make the day count by doing really what needs to be done. The rest can be wasted on twitter, blogging, or researching. These things are easier to do since you know how to do them already, the important task is unknown territory you need to spend that time on.

Money – Actively set aside money to invest in your business. I am going go against the flow and say your education isn’t in the same budget. Its easy to spend money on a book or on a real estate program. But its hard to spend money on a google ad, a website host or pressing the buy button in your investment account. Emotionally draining and scary at first to be exact. Your dollars matter more when risk is in play. And education is a small risk compared to working. Let what you learn work, even if it doesn’t hold all the answers. It really never does.

Faith-You will have failures. Big time failures. You’re going to  lose out while reality trains you that what is the correct or incorrect way to do somethings. But keep at refining, investing and trying to produce some good results.

I am the one who didn’t follow this advice. 2008 ended up being bad, because of it. Very much so till the very end of it. But sadly most of it wasn’t because I followed this advice, its because I choose to really focus on what didn’t bring results. And its more expensive too, because I put all my research and money that I spent on programs(some which cost month to month) aside. And all it would have taken was a try at using what I learned.

So to sum it up, the big three items into a resolution you can use is – Conqueror the unknown by constantly moving. That the only Resolution you really need this year if you need one.

 

Welcome back. PositiveCapitalism Startup 2.0

While 2008 left me with a few screw-ups, 2009 already is turning out better. While it seems odd to start up again during a recession, nothing more can convince me its an horrible time to. If you look at the previous web 2.0 startups, such as Facebook, and Google(well..they got big during the recession, but started just before) they were building up while the rest of the world was hoarding their money from any outside influence. The mantra of “finding a need and filling it” stills stays true in this time. Their also some other good reasons to start.

1. Gas prices have dropped, big time- Gas may have prevented money for some low wage earners(say 12 bucks an hour or lower) from saving up for starting a small side business. If you still have your job, you might notice that you have some small cash flowing in. My savings are at least 20-30 dollars per fill up. Instead of buying t-bone steak, or eating out 2  times more a week, with this savings, you could place some of it aside to build up some capital.

2. Price of equipment purchases have dropped in some cases by 12%-40%- the price of an computer LCD 22 inch monitor use to run $279(US) on average. Now its less than $180(and that’s with the after Christmas sales, or really not on sale) for even an high end one. The netbook, if you can type on reduced sized keyboards(or plug in your own), you can have a laptop starting at $279. Intel has released a new CPU line, dropping prices pretty low in some cases(quad core processor for $180). Goods like desks and such really have stayed the same, but they weren’t that expensive to begin with(50 dollars buys you a basic top with 4 legs at ikea, and it looks quite nice). So deals are going to be plenty, and you won’t have to wait or try to fight with someone to get it, and still walk away getting something at a decent price, and quality.

3. Outsourced labor competition may go up- While some are laid off from work, some might resort to doing work on rent-a-coder and other outsourcing/temp. Agencies. Using outsourced workers(and they don’t have to be in a different country, they can be from here) and paying them 12-30 bucks an hour for 1-3 hours worth of work, will help you get the ball rolling in an area your struggling with. At the same time your putting food on the table for someone else. If you been recently laid off, this might be a great time to outsource your talents, you excel at. You can do do a few hours a day of outsourced work, while looking for a job. Who knows you might find the freelance gig enjoyable, and drop the job search.

There is only one bad thing about recessions. It requires a lot more pacence with customers. They might move a bit slower sometimes. They might research a product a bit more or give it 24 hours to think about it. But the needs and wants still remain. Figuring out a strategy to meet this slowdown, is a key. But, if you work with them, and give a good product or compelling reason, they will buy.

So Welcome to my relaunch(third time a charm!), and hopefully yours.

 

Gaining Momentum, While Facing Burnout

In the past 2 weeks, I had a bout of sher laziness and burnout. Which was kind of odd. I had all my blog articles ready to be typed in, yet somehow I couldn’t even lift my hands to type on the keyboard. While I could rattle on how the constant loss of moving caused me to lose my business momentum and so on, I decided to instead talk about ways to prevent burnouts and possibly recover from them.

Burnouts are harder to deal with in beginner home businesses. Its frustrating to do so much work yourself, even if its less than what you might do in a typical workday, at your job; then have no results seem to happen. Its also common to have unrealistic expectations regarding your results. You can have burnouts in a mental sense, a financial sense, or a physical loss sense(loss of property, or even loss of energy, due to bad health or stress) Most blogs think burnouts are a matter of self control. Even the most productive, end up throwing their systems away for a day or two, or at least they take an afternoon nap! So maybe taking the idea of rest, instead of self control is better. Take 1-2 days off your business, like you would do from work. If your most productive days are your weekends, just use another time in the evening to work something else.  Sunday and Mondays are my days off, for example. Use this time to tend to another hobby, maybe catch up on the tv shows(DVR’s are huge time savers) or play a video game. I try to balance my hobbies too, instead of going hardcore at one for one month and then moving on to the next one for another. This way I don’t end up crashing, even as OC it sounds, plus that behavior could translate out into your business without knowing. Aside from giving your business its own weekend, the ability to start moving again when you burn completely out, is a hard one. Its just a matter of just doing it. Slowly creep back, lower the size of your to do list even if its down to one thing, just make it count.

Financial Burnout
Its really easy to not spend any capital investing in your home business. In these internet days, its even easier. However, some capital will be needed to sustain and grow, or step up to the next level. It doesn’t have to be much.
Where I was personally hit by when to start using capital, was when I was learning at Wealthy Affiliate, where they teach about starting out with bum marketing, where you use free resources, and write product reviews, and other articles about products. The amount of volume needed to get a bite, is understated a bit, but its easy to get burned out(mentally, not financially, unless your buying products at the same time), by not getting any traffic. I needed to make some changes, by increasing not only my volume, but maybe investing in creating websites to drive traffic to. That requires investing in a domain, which is less than 10 dollars a year(my WA membership includes hosting). But, its easy to say, no I don’t need to spend any money in till I make a profit to reinvest, even more so if you have an entirely broke mindset. So, you keep getting burned by not having any bites(mental) and you cannot then fulfill your money goals, when you could just spend some money you would spend anyways in investing in your business. The opposite can happen too. You spend too much on everything about learning, and not starting on doing, or you end up spending too much on towards a problem that need to be more tweaked or dropped, instead of its capital(*cough* our government *cough*).
Instead of becoming like the many who spend and end up failing before they could make it, just adjust capital slowly, from your own sources, making sure that it will truly benefit you in the long term.

Physical Burnout
This is a combo of mental that goes with this. You get tired and your health isn’t so great. You decided to place it on hold till you have the time freedom. Or you get a physical loss, like your computer is stolen, or it becomes broken down. The health one is easy to answer, the loss and malfunction- not so much. here some guidelines.
The loss of equipment can be a nightmare without a backup. But sometimes you can lose your backup too! Push to saving as much data you can onto the the web, using an email account, or Google Docs, etc. I have some redundancy for my writings, since I write drafts in notebooks. If your data is small enough, save it to a USB thumbdrive and keep it on your keychain.
Normally also to keep in mind of computer breakdowns, its only due to one part of a system failing, not the entire system. So, it may not be the hard drive. If it is, normally its very audible, you hear more grinding and files seem to take a bit to open, than normal. Thats when you need to get that data off quickly! Keeping some cash to drop about 200 or so dollars on a older system with a CRT Monitor from a local mom and pop store, and a up to date burned dvd of Linux somewhere, could get you back working in till your able to replace it with insurance, or rebuild. Or just ask around, some geek might have a collection going that you could borrow some parts from.
For your health, just keep it in balance. If your relying on 3 red bulls a day to go, something out of whack. Take some time to balance some time in to exercise, and eat a bit better everyday.

Rebuilding from a burnout is hard work, and instead of just trying to get back into the swing of things again, it might be better to just keep things balance, and aim for it. Its harder to maintain it this way, but done in small ways, you will feel a lot less guilty when your not doing anything, and fight your fear of failure.  Plus, remember even the productivity bloggers have days when they chill out for a bit.

Tags: Procrastination, Burnout, productivity, home business

 

A Late Reminder to Interact

Its is more by far a media producers, than media consumers world these days. People write blogs, produce videos on YouTube, and share other media works like photos or a useful shell script. People are getting more active, than ever before, and the consequences of this is good. Its not a taboo to teach another even if themselves are not a master(myself included). YouTube proves this often.  I saw a small lesson on  learning Arabic and a person complained that a newbie shouldn’t be teaching, this due to her ability to not  pronounce some words correctly, even if she admits it. The true reality is this – its better to provide a seed, to plant an interest, than it is to expect someone to suddenly only teach when they have bloomed already.  By  becoming active in the learning process , by teaching a skill to someone, even if incomplete, you end up learning more. One way is by comments on how to suggestions how to do something correctly.

Is it time to get public with your exploits? I think so. Why would you want to? To build a support group mostly. One of the keys to self improvement is to surround yourself with other successful, or wanting to succeed, like-minded individuals. By contributing information, and getting comments, like “keep up the good work”, or “awesome”, and “this video sucks,”(whoops! thats not suppose to be there!) you get the feed back you need to fill yourself with to keep on going.

Most books that cover this tidbit, make it sound like you just suddenly have it happen as more and more your exploits attract the attention of others. But reality is, you have to work for your fans. Blogging exposed this to me a bit. For example, for traffic, you just don’t throw a post up with reverent tags and then hope for traffic. No, I have to work by going to forums, or being part of some group, and interact with others, and someone might click on my signature link. I brought more people to my blog that way than just tagging.
Its really time consuming, and I can always do more, but for now I hope to benefit my core niche a bit with what I have currently(I hope).
Find ways to work for your customers/audience, and if your consistantly give them wat info nuggets they need, over time, they might return a favor with a sale or a nugget of info you need. Utopian? A bit, I admit. But it works, and thats all that matters.

An Update Note on Action Steps
Once again, I am reworking the action step section on my blog. I have let it slip to inactivity while I was lazy, and now when I am working on my business much more. Mostly, I am thinking about creating a whole blog about it, where I have nearly a post per week covering each of the steps in detail, but I have to build up the articles first before I attempt to do that. So right now its the early phases of being redone. Last time I got stuck on the muse part, since thats what I’m currently working on, and really didn’t have a game plan. Now, I think I have a bit of an idea what my muse goals should be. So sometime in September, or so, I will have some idea to do with that section. Till then hold tight, and I apologize for the time delay. I want to let my business dictate the direction of things, instead of just picking stuff by theory, which wouldn’t be as relevant. I will not be taking the section down for the time being, since there really no appealing reason to.

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Tags: seo, internet interaction, web promotion, internet promotion, home business promotion, action steps to building a home business

 

Developing My Sense Of Urgency

Building a muse, even a small one like mine, has been more about finding quick tips to avoid real work aka generating content. Its not that generating content is hard, or time consuming, its more like ” do I really want to?” type. This thought became more and more stronger not only in my business, but for everything I did from exercising to my obligations at work.
Before anyone screams manic depressive(going from super worker, to wanting to lay in a bed all day watching TV), all I really was facing is a bout of laziness and motivation. I was still interested in my muse, but I didn’t want to do the work. Obviously, when I didn’t work on it. Nothing happened, adding fuel to the fire, to continue the laziness.

Nowadays, with rising costs to live and not being in any situation to have a safety valve from it till things balance, I have developed a new sense of urgency. If I don’t build my business, well guess what?
I am going to be stuck in a endless loop of catch up to live. Its very depressing. It took us longer to feel the pinch than most, but when you do it turns into a a punch to the stomach. It literately, came on like, a switch, with this stark realization. I have to fight my sense of idleness, and really just do some things differently. Its really crazy, when you have some stuff that needs to be put out, and its just sitting there like its needs to be polished again and again, when its already good enough to go. Now, that laziness is sure beginning to sound like perfectionism, or the fear of failure. And quite frankly, the more I let this content sit, the more frustrating it will be if it doesn’t pan out.

 I have set up a counter, starting tonight. I have 60 days to build my muse and produce any income, even if its just one dollar in profit,  or else I need to pack my bags, and try a different tactic. For the next two months, I’m going to be journaling about this, to make sure I’m making progress. I will add a Facebook blog about it and edit it whenever I make changes. That way I won’t bore anyone with personal activities, unless your truly interested. The link will appear in a week(I mean it!). I hope it will inspire you and help you make less mistakes than I do. This blog focus will still be about general home business topics. I’ve been running out of contently lately due to..laziness, but I already brainstormed some ideas, that will pan out into something worth reading.

Now, excuse me, I have some work to tend to…

And its not organizing file folders(thats another topic, for a later time)

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Tags: urgency, lazyness, muse building, home business building, getting work done, freaking out

 

A Small Offer

Normally, I wouldn’t do this but, I feel like its important enough to share. One of the products I use, called Wealthy Affiliate(WA, for short), has been a great help for me in learning about affiliate marketing. It helped me by breaking everything down into a 8 week plan( by my slow standards, is taking much longer than that), and the very friendly and helpful web forum. It does also web hosting, and some great tools like a keyword tool, keyword list for some industries, and a Clickbank product finder. While their are free tools(like google keyword tool just works fine, and cb engine, for Clickbank), The biggest help is the plan. While there are plenty of affiliate marketing forums out there, most of them become victim of themselves; with people arguing over the dumbest stuff, and you waste time trying to go through post after post of garbage. I love the genuine help and focus from WA, and it was much more helpful than when I was trying to go about it on my own.
Recently, they announced they will do a price change after May 6th. The price wasn’t listed, but it going to be more than what it cost right now. It cost 30 bucks a month, and this might change, drastically(based upon the commission structure) I really like this product, and I found it to be well worth being a member of, and if you don’t like it, you can always cancel your subscription. I know reading from other members, they been part of WA for nearly 2 years, and still haven’t left!
So if your interested in creating an affiliate marketing muse, your overwhelmed by the information overload, and you need a plan to start, this would be the place to go. While I could have waited to promote WA later, I thought it would be better to get y’all in while the price is quite cheaper. So its really worth considering? It helped me make my first sale. That matters the world to me and to you, if it put you a step closer to the same, that success.
My Link to Wealthy Affiliate

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Tags: WealthyAffiliate review, Wealthy Affiliate, Affiliate Marketing, WA price increase

 

The Weekly Update…

My muse is now slowly ramping up. I have spent only about 30 dollars now, and no return on sales. Oops! So, I am taking a step back from my pay-per-click(PPC)marketing and try something else, before attempting again.

While some tactics at this point would be to offer services of some kind, I’m trying to avoid this to an extent. This would be more like being self employed, meaning once you are not producing, your not making money. Ideally for me, I don’t want to create a new 15 hour a day job. So I’m going to keep “services” to a minimum. There is some natural self employment aspects in the beginning, but you just don’t want to make this your core aspect or the cash cow of your business.

At this time frame, you have to keep reminding yourself your in business. Its one of the hardest things to do. You might want to just run back to just doing more research, where its safe and beat yourself for not having found the magic bullet yet. While dealing with the unknown, your fighting fear. Its not an easy task, nor do I have an answer at this time to cope with such emotions, other than ride it out. I hope your not dealing with the same emotions as I am when you start out!

Working on a new page for the website, where I’m going to discuss my muse in better detail and the programs that I use. Stay tuned for that one, it should be up soon.

 

A Plan To Organize

While I slowly follow a weekly plan for ramping up my first business, I was doing some reading from an older book called The Organized Executive(non-aff. link). It spends most of its time talking about how to to effectively manange time, by how your organize how you read your mail in the morning, how to use a admin aid, and setting up a filing system. The book inspired me regarding the latter, to do some on the computer.

I keep a lot of tidbits, e-books, and other data offline, and having them just all of over the hard drive didn’t make much sense, nor did it it make sense to have a folder littered with files, aka the My Document folder. So, this is what I’m trying out:

First, I broke down the stuff I keep into content. I created a folder on that content. Then I broke it further down into sub-folders. For example: I have a folder on Business, then I would have a sub folder maybe on Internet Business, then in that folder one regarding Search Engine Optimization, and maybe another one for Yahoo Ads marketing. In each sub folder I create a content.txt file. This is for later.

Next, after creating the folders, its time to take the junk files and organize them into their appropriate folder. Keeping them in the junk folder, I browse thru each file for content in it and then open up the content.txt for the folder it belongs in. I write a quick note about the file. example

tought.pdf – talks about personal motivation in tough times.

This file becomes a bit of a card index file like at a library. This way if your stumped for information, you refer the card first, instead of the old way of just browsing everything in the folder.

Once the files are screened, and wrote up about, move the file over to its new home.

While this seems like a lot of work, and at the same time old fashioned, its really nice to have things stored this way for quick reference. You can then scale it to your prefrences.

- If you find a magazine article you like to keep, scan it and place it with your digital files. This way you don’t need to keep ripped articles around or entire magazines. Also, its efficient because you keep your loved articles, instead of forgetting about them 6 months later.

-You can save articles from the internet, if you fear they would disappear for time reasons(rare, but..its annoying to re-research something and have the page removed, common on college student pages). Easiest way I found is to just convert them to pdf’s, by selecting the print you want, and printing to file(instead of printer). You need a program in Windows XP/Vista to do this(you can still print to file, but not the pdf format), but Linux and Macintosh already setup to support this.

If your feeling extra geeky, you can put it on a NAS(Network Attached Storage) or a network shared folder so it can be used by others or to have access on a different computer.

While this may seem a bit old fashion to do in an age of tagging and meta data, this system is a simple start, and I doubt you tried to tag all your data anyways. Plus, why waste 45 seconds searching content of files? I bet you can open folders faster! This act might lead to doing some real tiding up maybe on a shelf or in a household junk drawer. Who knows?

 

Muse Start-up(Sorry For The Hibernation)

Let me start off by explaining why I haven’t written for 2 weeks. I’ve been tired, doing probably one of the dumbest things when your trying to just create a new income- start a diet and exercise regime. Starting 2 lifestyle changes at the same time, is quite possibly the dumbest thing you can do. So start one, then once one of the changes is in maintenance mode, follow with the next.

In the opening of my muse, you would think their would be much work to do, things to be busy with and so on.

The start-up of my muse(an affiliate marketing business, the easiest route) , was a task that lasted less than a hour. I have semi-planned by having a list of programs and the places I was going to sell ad time on, which is Google( adsense) at this time, maybe others later such as Yahoo or MSN. I then clocked out after an hour and spent the rest of the evening watching a movie with my Wife.

I imagine more tasks that could take place if you were to incorporate, which would go even with the amount of fanfare as above! Since you can use one of the e-Providers, without really talking to a lawyer(I would feel personally, this would be a better route, for documenting reasons if you were to file for a C corporation). This go around(and I might shooting myself in the foot) I am not spending the cash on a creation of a business entity, such as a LLC. I will later in about 3 months when I can afford it(about $300 dollars, to do it right) and the tax reasons to do so. Transferring should be to complicated.

In other startup activities, I bought a new task chair. There goes something a tax ride off would of been useful for. But since its more as much for personal computing and business activities, oh well. My butt and back feel ten times better than from my previous chair.

With all of this about my startup(finally) in mind, with the start of my first business I’m going to need an opinion. Write about it separately from this blog, do I stay committed to a more general topic range, Or could I just mix and match? Your Option does matter, so leave a comment!

 

The No Thrill way to developing a Business Plan

Normally, a business plan is used to layout a business, so it can get funding from venture capital firms, angel investors, and other private capital. It goes into great details about the business concept, its marketing plan, how the funding is spent(for example salaries, traveling, and other perks), and sales projections. Creating these documents, is a time consuming process and might not really produce much more than more paperwork. The types of small business,such as our muse, these business plans are generally too complex. Since some planning has some purposes, and generally setting goals isn’t exactly a step backwards, having a business plan is worth having. Instead of investing in a business plan project program, or doing one by hand, a one to two page document, with some key items is more effective for our purposes at this time. From this document, by breaking down what your business is you also can create an optional elevator pitch and easier quick explanation of your business. At minimum, our business plan should have the following:

What is the intention of your business?
What is your widget your creating or what goal is it trying to reach? Explain it in a few sentences. Optionally, you can also place a mission statement if you have one near the top here also.

 

How you plan to reach to potential customers, in a nutshell.

Don’t list a full marketing plan containing slogans, ad concepts, and ad copy. A marketing plan is essential for your business, and can be drawn up later. For now just write up a general program. For example: will use Google adwords advertising on (insert category) keyword(s), or cheap TV ad time in the middle of the night on Saturdays.

 

Your Financial Milestones

Write down what you expect to make in 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year, and if you wish, go beyond that. Write also, how you do it. Is it by obtaining funding or by bootstrapping using your profits to keep layering more business?

 

Some optional items

You can list some goals, write how much time per week you have to dedicate to your business(time commitment), and if you have a business partner, list his/her’s responsibilities in the business, and your. This one is critical, so things are kept formally, instead of informally, which can cause problems if there a business divorce.

 

While this document may seems like a useless page of data, its really setting up what you business needs to do to function. Call it a formal written page of goals and expectations. Plus, seeing how you business is going to function, you can narrow your focus, than if it was just thought up in your brain. If you have any more suggestions for business plans, please leave a comment or two!